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Growing up, Julie Lemieux's hunger for religion was, well, literal.
"The goal of going to church was so that we could eat at Denny's afterwards!" said Lemieux, a 1998 Washington University graduate who now is serving as an intern at the campus' Catholic Student Center.
Like so many of her Generation X contemporaries, Lemieux's appetite for faith has since grown. In fact, today's college students -- the product of a Me Generation whose spiritual indifference caused Time magazine to ask "Is God Dead?" -- are seeking the religious embrace that many of their parents rejected.
"Especially on a campus like Wash U., where a lot of people come from relatively stable financial backgrounds, students see that maybe those aren't the things that are going to make you happy," Lemieux said. "A lot of the energy comes from having grown up in the '80s and having consumerism consume them.
"It's become more and more obvious that people are looking for something more theological, more prayerful, more introspective," she said. "People are definitely hungering for it."
The hard evidence is indisputable. Attendance has risen dramatically at Catholic Student Center services, swelling from 45 to 900 in less than a decade. St. Louis Hillel has a mailing list that includes 1,100 Jewish undergraduates. Eighteen distinct religions now are represented by campus ministers. The number of students majoring in religious studies has doubled in the past handful of years. A multitude of ecumenical student groups have formed, many with strenuous service missions.
Less tangible are the "why's." The Rev. Gary Braun, director of the Catholic Student Center, said that spiritual yearning can come both out of emptiness and fullness.
"There are a lot of painful and unnerving things going on in the culture," Braun said. "Random violence has left this generation with a sense of their mortality at an earlier age. I don't think they're coming to religion for safety, but I think that limitation experience makes them look more for meaning.
"The same with the rapid pace of their lives," Braun continued. "They have so many options in any given hour that it feels like life is zooming. The information they can access, which would have taken me eight hours, they can do in two minutes. Everything is telescoped. It makes them a little more intentional about their lives.
"But they're also driven here by gratitude," Braun said. "Experiences of awe and wonder drive them to their knees."
David Levy felt that wonderment. This past December, the sophomore graphic design major whose parents "were actually afraid that I'd go to college and get rid of Judaism altogether" was aboard a plane with 800 other college students (12 from WU), en route to Israel. "We touched down and people were cheering and going nuts," he said. "Just from the emotion of being in Israel."
That fervor soon paled relative to Levy's first experience at the hallowed Wailing Wall. "I was there. And I couldn't even speak," he said haltingly. "I didn't even know what to do. I realized that there was so much to this. There is so much I didn't know. It was just an overwhelming feeling. People were just bent over crying. You touch itÉ Speechless."
The transcendence that Levy experienced went beyond the realm of practical religion to the ethereal, the truly spiritual.
"I would say that spirituality is coloring everything around you with shades of infinity -- looking at things beyond their outward proportion," said Osman Handoo, a junior double-majoring in political science and Arabic studies.
"You can be a spiritual person and look at something that is mundane and really see God working," he continued. "For instance, if you had a tree and you had a capitalist look at it, he would think in terms of lumber; if you had a poet look at it, he would look at it in terms of its beauty and would try to describe it; if you have a spiritual person look at it, he would see it in terms of God's majesty and God's grace. So spirituality for me is seeing the divine in everything and being aware of God, being aware of our own baser tendencies and striving to uphold the laws of God in our lives."
Handoo, a Muslim born to immigrant parents in Kentucky and raised in Kansas City, said that his faith makes the internal behavioral tug-of-war inherent in college life easier to handle. "For me, temptation on this campus has never been that much of a problem," he said. "In Islam, the more that you increase in love for God and the more you become committed to following his law out of love, then temptation becomes much, much less difficult. The little decisions, the little problems in life fall away."
The paradox is that, by nature, the college years are self-absorbing, whereas religion preaches selflessness.
"Yes, at this university we're trying to rise to the top and we want to better our worldly prospects -- as well as increase our knowledge," Handoo said. "And that, necessarily, is a concern of the self. Broadly speaking, our job at this university is to develop ourselves and not necessarily develop our spirits. You can definitely get caught up in all the different demands on time and energy that this school can put on you.
"But once you have a genuine realignment of the soul and you really want to move forward in your spiritual progress, then it's not as difficult anymore," he said.
It's a quest that's easier said than done, Braun said. "Wash U. kids are so driven," he said. "What I dealt with when I was 25, they were dealing with at 15. It's something akin to a mid-life crisis at an early age. What sets Wash U. students apart from other schools that I've worked with is the underlying perfectionism -- the inner dissatisfaction with who they are and the inability to differentiate who they are from what they do. There's an insidious, toxic perfectionism here. If they separate out who they are from what they do, they're so much freer and so much happier.
"I think it's an experience of divinity for them to forget themselves," Braun said. "These years are so self-conscious, these years are so self-promoting, that when they're helping someone else for a minute, for a flash, for a nano-second, they're forgetting themselves. And that's a spiritual moment."
Religion has always been strong in relaying that deeper sense of meaning, said Ahmet T. Karamustafa, Ph.D., associate professor of Islamic thought and religious studies and director of the Religious Studies Program in Arts and Sciences. "Religion has the facility to supply people with a sense of purpose and also a sense of belonging to a greater whole," he said. "It's quite clear that students these days need both.
"They need to supply their lives with meaning, with something that goes beyond the commonsensical, everyday experience," he said. "As well, they need something that makes them feel like it's not just them, their isolated selves, thrown into a life full of other isolated individuals -- but that there is a greater unit. Religious communities provide this in ways that some students had not experienced before coming to college. They discover this as a possibility."
And the accompanying surge in academic interest is heartening, said Fatemeh Keshavarz, Ph.D., associate professor of Persian language and literature, director of the Center for the Study of Islamic Societies and Civilizations, and Karamustafa's spouse. "I think it's very healthy that they're not doing this just outside classrooms," she said. "They want to explore this in all its possible dimensions. They would like to experience it on a spiritual, personal level -- but they would also like to explore it intellectually. I think this is a very good sign. They want to still keep a critical mind."
Added Karamustafa: "Quite clearly, students are making another kind of statement, that they want to think about the fundamental questions of life while they're in college. This is something that perhaps we have not always been too responsive to. When you look at the curriculum, yes, there are very important social, political, economic and environmental issues that are discussed in our courses -- but perhaps the deeper, personal fundamental questions are not always as rigorously addressed in courses."
Today's students are asking for and receiving affirming messages in their place of worship, in the classroom -- and even in their residence halls. Three times a semester, 400 Jewish students -- many of whom are on the South 40 -- receive and share boxes containing candles, wine and bread. "We call it 'Sabbath in a Box,'" said Rabbi Hyim Shafner of Hillel. The ultimate Happy Meal, one might say.
"There's been an incredible response," said Shafner. "We realize that not everybody wants to come to Hillel -- but they might want something Jewish. Their souls are talking to them."
And many students are listening.
